David Krut Projects is delighted to present Virginia MacKenny—Crossing
29 October
18h00 for 18h30
The exhibition will be opened by Prof. Jeremy Wafer
The works in this exhibition invite unusual visual associations across their rich terrain, making surprising connections between high-end technology and the makeshift.
Dominated by colour fields of blue, the paintings offer a fluid terrain on which large and small objects float with equal prominence and where ordinary events, such as a birthday party, are juxtaposed with extraordinary ones, such as the crash landing of a plane on the Hudson River in New York, in which all the passengers survived.
In one work, a mass migration of cow-nosed stingrays seen from the air in the Gulf of Mexico is a field of transient forms that echoes the latticework pattern in a graphic rendering of a black hole (Crossing: Black Hole). MacKenny’s interest in vision and the recording of images is suggested by a reverse image of the first cyanotype depicting the scaffolding that held John Frederick William Herschel’s telescope used to document the stars and nebulae of the southern skies from Cape Town.
The images in these works are isolated, separated from each other, some iconic and emblematic, others quotidian, almost secretive in their visual presence. They shift between different visual codes and are finally subsumed into a complex matrix that combines the diagrammatic with the illusionistic.
Mixing reverence, nostalgia, irony and a sense of wonder, the paintings encourage viewers to reflect on the making of meaning in a world of critical and rapid change.
Virginia MacKenny was awarded the Volkskas Atelier Award and the Ampersand Foundation Award. She is represented in a number of public collections and has exhibited her work widely. MacKenny is Senior Lecturer in Painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.